Playwright Boo Killebrew‘s father, whom she had not spoken to in years, stayed behind after Hurricane Katrina hit their hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi to care for the victims. She penned a complexly layered play combining his father’s accounts as a doctor during the storm with her own difficult relationship with the man. On the 10-year anniversary of the tragic storm, Raven Theatre gives Killebrew’s meta-theatrical play its Midwest premiere.

An unfinished set features a lighting board, laptop, and script sides stage left. Boo Killebrew (Tuckie White) and her father Larry (Joe Mack) use these items to control the unfolding of three scenarios witnessed to some extent by Larry: an elderly southern lady who hasn’t abandoned her home through decades of hurricane warnings and has no intention to do so for Katrina, a family of three who ride out the storm due to a lack of means to evacuate, and a pair of emergency medical technicians stranded in their ambulance as water rises. The Killebrews not only directly address the audience and control the action, but discuss edits to the production and include snippets of their own troubled past.

The primary problem with this framework lies in our seeing too much of father and daughter jabbering about what scenes to include and not enough of the scenes themselves. In essence, the concept of the play within the play becomes more important than the circumstances suffered by the storm victims. The secondary problem lies in certain exchanges between the two of them getting ‘read’ off scripts. I realize this is done to illustrate how difficult bridging the gap between them and discussing their differences must have been, but it’s dramatically less interesting to see these two emotionally charged characters avoid eye contact.

All of this results in a presumably unintentional Verfremdungseffekt, distancing the audience from the characters. The three victim accounts feel less real despite their being based on actual events. Some inconsistencies in dialect contribute to this feeling as well. Helping to pull the audience back in are a handful of understated, realistic performances from Tuckie Whiteas Boo, Joe Mackas her father Larry, and Aaron Lammas Michael Thomas, the pre-pubescent flood victim. Sandra Watson plays the larger-than-life Essie with such authenticity and conviction that I’m certain I’ve met that character somewhere before.

The most interesting character, Kenny Tyson (Patrick Agada), believes that he intermittently travels through time. He has traveled to the day he dies before: the day Katrina hits, and remains resigned to his fate. Kenny also has an unconsummated love interest with Boo and a strong-yet-contentious friendship with his EMT partner Neil (Nick Horst). You could center a full-length play around this intriguing character, but here we only receive a tease of his complexities.

The Play About My Dadis a good, complex production that director Marti Lyonsdoes her best to simplify, but you come away from the experience feeling unsatisfied. As someone who fortunately had the ability to evacuate New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, I should feel more emotionally impacted from seeing accounts of those who did not. Boo Killebrew insists that re-telling their stories in this layered manner brings us "closer to the truth than the truth." Perhaps that is so, but it distances us from the emotion.

Rating: ★★½

The Play About My Dad continues through November 28th at Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark (map), with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays 3:30pm. Tickets are $18-$42, and are available by phone (773-338-2177) or online through OvationTix.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at RavenTheatre.com. (Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes, includes an intermission)